--- schema_version: "library-reader-v1" source_type: "original_book" title: "Digital Capitalism" author: null edition: null publisher: null year: null isbn: "2021022153" library_document_id: "50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed" source_sha256: "746bfc1e2253e11737253daad663d7176077b6b54343c2c35f6f132990452fbc" pdf_physical_page_count: 343 pdf_physical_page_index_base: 0 range_start: 120 range_count: 10 html_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed?start=120&limit=10" markdown_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed.md?start=120&limit=10" previous_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed.md?start=110&limit=10" next_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed.md?start=130&limit=10" --- # Digital Capitalism > 页码规则：PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX 是从 0 开始的权威文件物理页索引；PRINTED_PAGE 是页面中识别出的印刷页码，可能为空，二者不得混用。 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=120 | PRINTED_PAGE=106 Here are some examples from cultural studies. David Morley (2019) claims that the Frankfurt School “guys were past their sell by date when Jeremy Corbyn was a nipper”. John Fiske (1989, 183) argues that the “Frankfurt School have no room in their scenario for resistant or evasive practices” and represent “a left-wing elitism”. Henry Jenkins (2006) writes that Adorno “doesn't know anything about popular culture, he's never consumed any popular culture – in fact, it seems like he’s never even spoken to anybody who's ever consumed any popular culture!”. Du Gay et al. (1997, 87) argue that Horkheimer and Adorno’s culture industry hypothesis, “citizens are turned into a passive mass of consumers” and “all is false and inauthentic”. Storey (2006, 55) claims that the “Frankfurt School perspective on popular culture is essentially a discourse from above on the culture of other people”. Hesmondhalgh (2019, 30) writes that “there is a constant sense in Adorno and Horkheimer that the battle has already been lost, that culture has been already subsumed”. Such prejudices keep students, scholars, and citizens from engaging with Adorno. They are false in at least three respects. First, Adorno did not despise popular culture as such, but its commodity form. He pointed out the critical role of the clown in popular culture (Adorno 1996) and was a “fan” of the clown of all clowns – Charlie Chaplin. In the Culture Industry-chapter of the Dialectic of the Enlightenment, positive elements of popular culture are visible. For example, Adorno writes that “traces of something better persist in those features of the culture industry by which it resembles the circus” (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 114). Adorno’s fondness of Chaplin, the figure of the clown, and the circus shows that he was not opposed to entertainment as such. He rather despised capitalism and therefore the commodity form. Second, Adorno wasn’t a determinist and fatalist. He stressed the antagonistic character of culture and saw active potentials of resistance and liberation. For example, he wrote about the culture industry’s antagonisms: In its attempts to manipulate the masses the ideology of the culture industry itself becomes as internally antagonistic as the very society which it aims to control. The ideology of the culture industry contains the antidote to its own lie. No other plea could be made for its defence. (Adorno 1991, 181) 106 Theorists ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=121 | PRINTED_PAGE=107 He also argued that audiences consume and accept the culture industry’s products “with a kind of reservation” so that “it is not quite believed in”, “the integration of consciousness and free time has not yet completely succeeded”, “the real interests of individuals are still strong enough to resist, within certain limits, total inclusion”, “a society, whose inherent contradictions persist undiminished, cannot be totally integrated even in consciousness”, “a chance of maturity (Mündigkeit)” remains (Adorno 1991, 196–197). Third, Adorno didn’t see capitalist society and the culture industry as having no alternatives, which means that he wasn’t a political and cultural pessimist. Adorno stressed the potentials for alternative media. He stresses that television/Fernsehen literally means to watch into the distance. True television would enable humans to watch into society’s future. Therefore, to keep the promise still resonating within the word [television], it must emancipate itself from everything within which it – reckless wish-fulfilment – refutes its own principle and betrays the idea of Good Fortune for the smaller fortunes of the department store. (Adorno 1998, 57) Adorno argued for the use of TV in anti-fascist education in order to reach “the nerve centres” of the authoritarian personality (Adorno 1967, 24). Adorno certainly would have supported the Maximilian-Kolke-Werk’s project that has since 2010 organised meetings of young journalists and media studies students with survivors of the Nazis’ extermination camps. The students create and publish videos, interviews, written and audio reports, blog postings, etc. that they spread via various media, including social media such as YouTube. Adorno would welcome using social media and usergenerated content platforms for anti-fascist education but would advice against combining such content with ads. Adorno was a public intellectual who effectively used broadcast media for discussing contemporary political issues. He especially gave lectures on the radio and participated in discussions broadcast on radio and television. Today, there are Adorno-CDs and many Adorno broadcasts are available on YouTube. Adorno’s works are complex and multi-layered. They are of key importance today for understanding contemporary society, including the interaction of capitalism and digital technologies. The next section, therefore, gives based on Adorno attention to the digital culture industry. Chapter Four | Adorno and the Media in Digital Capitalism 107 Adorno’s Demonisation ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=122 | PRINTED_PAGE=108 4.3 The Digital Culture Industry The culture industry is a particularly capitalist form of mediation where culture and the economy interlock and culture is mediated by the commodity form. As a consequence, the culture industry “is interested in human beings only as its customers and employees and has in fact reduced humanity as a whole, like each of its elements, to this exhaustive formula” (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002, 118). “[U]se value in the reception of cultural assets is being replaced by exchange value” (128). The culture industry subjects human meaning-making to the commodity form in multiple respects: • Cultural workers sell their labour-power in order to produce culture; • Culture takes on the form of cultural commodities; • Advertising propagates the sale of commodities; • Consumer culture advances an environment and lifestyles of commodity consumption. In digital capitalism, the commodity form dominates everyday life in digital culture as a multitude of digital commodities. Table 4.1 gives an overview of commodities in the digital culture industry. In the digital culture industry, digital labour-power, digital content, online services, computing hardware, access to digital networks, digital ads, access to digital resources, and digital content libraries are sold as commodities. There are also capital accumulation models that combine the sale of various digital commodities. The digital culture industry faces 11 problems (Fuchs 2020a, 2020b): there is (1) the exploitation of digital labour; (2) digital surveillance; (3) transnational digital corporations’ monopoly power; (4) a digital attention economy where corporations and celebrities control lots of online visibility, voice and attention; (5) a digital commerce culture where the dominant social media platforms are digital tabloids dominated by tabloid entertainment and advertising. Political and educational content (“public service content”) is minority content. (6) Digital acceleration results in information flows and communication that are processed at very high speed on social media. The attention span given to information is very short. (7) There is a lack of time and space for complex and deep analysis and discussion. (8) There are unsocial/individualistic social media focused on the accumulation of attention and agreement to individual profiles and postings as well as anti-social social media that pose a threat to democracy. In the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Cambridge Analytica paid Global Science Research for conducting fake online personality tests in order to obtain personal Facebook data of almost 90 million users (first assumed to be 50 million) that were used for targeting political ads and fake news during election campaigns. The scandal showed how anti-social social media combine far-right ideology, digital capitalism, and the neoliberal mode of regulation: far-right activists use all means necessary for manipulating information. Online corporations see data generation as a way of achieving profits. The lack of legal regulation of corporate social media platforms invites data and content commodification that does not care about whether targeted ads sell fascism or chocolate cookies. 108 Theorists ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=123 | PRINTED_PAGE=109 (9) In the age of new nationalism and new authoritarianism, a culture has emerged that results in the publication and spread of false online news, post-truth politics where citizens distrust facts, and the emotionalisation of politics. (10) In automated algorithmic politics, automated computer programmes (“bots”) replace human activities, post information, make “likes”, etc. As a consequence, it has become more difficult to identify if information and dis/agreements stem from humans or machines. (11) On the Internet, there are fragmented publics that take on the form of filter bubbles. Chapter Four | Adorno and the Media in Digital Capitalism 109 The Digital Culture Industry ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=124 | PRINTED_PAGE=110 These 11 tendencies have resulted in a public sphere that is characterised and divided by economic, political, and cultural power asymmetries Targeted online advertising is the capital accumulation model that dominates the Internet and social media platforms. Adorno stresses the importance of advertising in the culture industry: “Culture is a paradoxical commodity. It is so completely subject to the law of exchange that it is no longer exchanged. […] it merges with the advertisement” (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 131). He argues that advertising is the culture industry’s “elixir of life” (131). In the digital culture industry, advertising has taken on a new form. Smythe (1977) analysed advertising’s political economy. He stresses that in advertising-funded media, it is not the content that is the commodity. It is the “time of the audiences, which is sold to advertisers” (3). He argues that audiences of advertising-funded media conduct audience labour that produces the audience commodity. The larger the number of viewers, listeners, readers of such media, the higher ad rates can be set. On social media, the audience commodity takes on a peculiar form. It is a big data commodity created by digital labour: users of produce online attention, big data, and online social relations that are the foundations of targeted ads. Whereas audiences produce meanings of content, users of Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, etc. also produce big data, content, and social relations. They are prosumers (producing consumers). There is constant real-time surveillance of online behaviour that is used for targeting ads. Ads are personalised. Predictive algorithms predict users’ interests in commodities. Ad prices are often set based on algorithmic auctions that use the pay per view- or the pay per click-mode. Facebook and Google are not communications companies, but the world’s largest advertising agencies. Marx pointed out that commodity fetishism means that the commodity form and the money form conceal the “social character of private labour and the social relations between the individual workers, by making those relations appear as relations between material objects, instead of revealing them plainly” (Marx 1867, 168–169). The commodity hides the social relations that produce it. It thereby empties out the meaning of commodities. Advertising uses this void and fills it with commodity ideology. The social media commodity inverts commodity fetishism. The commodity character of Facebook data is hidden behind the social use-value of Facebook, that is the social relations and functions enabled by platform use. The object status of users, that is the fact that they serve the profit interests of Facebook, is hidden behind the social networking enabled by Facebook. Social activity veils digital labour and its digital commodity. What some call the sharing economy is in fact platform capitalism. A true “sharing society” has to “begin by really sharing what it has, or all its talk of sharing is false or at best marginal” (Williams 1983, 101). 110 Theorists ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=125 | PRINTED_PAGE=111 Adorno created foundations of a theory of the authoritarian personality and fascism. After the new world economic crisis 2008, new forms of nationalism and authoritarianism proliferated. Their proponents have also made use of digital authoritarianism, that is the use of the Internet and social media for spreading authoritarian ideology. Thinking about the relevance of Adorno today must therefore encompass thinking about digital authoritarianism. 4.4 Digital Authoritarianism The digital humanities and computational social science are the dominant approaches in the empirical analysis of social media. They focus on big data analytics, that is the quantitative analysis of vast amounts of data collected online. The danger of big data analytics is that the “convergence of social-scientific methods toward those of the natural sciences is itself the child of a society that reifies people” (Pollock and Adorno 2011, 20). In neoliberal capitalism, first the business school’s logic colonised the university. Today, computer science in combination with the logic of the business school has started to colonise the social sciences and humanities. Critical digital and social media research is the alternative to big data analytics (Fuchs 2019, 2017). It combines critical theory, qualitative empirical research, and political praxis. Critical social media discourse analysis is a form of critical digital and social media research that is focused on the analysis of online ideology (Fuchs 2020a, 2018). It allows us to conduct analyses that focus on the question: how is nationalism and authoritarianism communicated online and on social media? Such analyses can be grounded in the theory of the authoritarian personality. Fromm (1936) argues that authoritarian societies, including capitalism, foster sadomasochistic personalities (117–118) who feel pleasure in both submission to authority Chapter Four | Adorno and the Media in Digital Capitalism 111 Digital Authoritarianism ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=126 | PRINTED_PAGE=112 Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) Individual ⇔ Group ⇔ Institution ⇔ Society RWA's social role: Deflection of attention from structures of class, capitalism and domination and the subjection of underdogs/scapegoats. In their book The Authoritarian Personality, Adorno et al. (1950) developed the F scale that measures the authoritarian personality. There were four versions that consisted of 78, 60, 45, and 40 questions organised along nine dimensions. For qualitative research, a comprehensive model of right-wing authoritarianism that has four dimensions can be developed (Figure 4.1). Right-wing authoritarianism is an ideology and organisational model of society. It integrates top-down leadership, nationalism, the friend/enemy-scheme, and militant patriarchy. Top-down leadership is right-wing authoritarianism’s organisational principle. Nationalism forms its internal identity that is bounded by defining outside enemies who are seen as not belonging to and threatening the nation. Militant patriarchy advocates law-and-order policies and violence as means for solving conflicts. 112 Theorists ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=127 | PRINTED_PAGE=113 Taken together, right-wing authoritarianism is an ideology that distracts attention from the complex problems of society’s problems and the role that class plays in society. A critical social media discourse analysis of Donald Trump’s tweets allows us to show the importance of Adorno’s theory today (see Fuchs 2018 for an in-depth analysis). 4.4.1 Top-Down Leadership First, let us have a look at the dimension of top-down leadership. The relative use of first-person singular pronouns (“I”, “me”) over first-person plural pronouns (“We”, “Us”) in American English is 0.173, which means that on average the use of the first-person singular is 17.3% higher in written American English than the use of the first-person plural (Uz 2014). I conducted an analysis of pronouns of 1,815 tweets by Donald Trump (see Table 4.2). First-person singular pronouns were 28% more frequent than firstperson plural pronouns, which provides indications that Trump has a narcissistic personality. Twitter is a me-centred medium that lives through the accumulation of followers, likes and re-tweets. The custom of liking and re-tweeting on Twitter appeals to Trump’s narcissism. Trump makes use of Twitter for broadcasting 280-character long sound bites about what he likes and dislikes. An analysis of the elimination scenes in 201 episodes of reality TV programme The Apprentice with Donald Trump as host showed that in 47.3% of eliminations of candidates Trump used the argument “You have no leadership capacities!” (Fuchs 2018, 183–190). Reality TV and Twitter are Trump’s preferred two contemporary formats of public communication. Both support narcissism and that Trump can present himself as a strong leader. Trump conducts first-person singular politics via Twitter. Chapter Four | Adorno and the Media in Digital Capitalism 113 Digital Authoritarianism ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=128 | PRINTED_PAGE=114 The great little man is according to Adorno “a person who suggests both omnipotence and the idea that he is just one of the folks” (Adorno 1951, 142). Trump constructs himself as the great little man on Twitter and reality TV. Trump’s demagogic, aggressive, attack-oriented, offensive, proletarian language, and style make him appear as a great little man who is on top, but at the same time is an ordinary person. He acts as a politician just like he acts as a reality TV entertainer. He brings populism in the form of popular culture and authoritarianism into politics. Trump appeals to the working class by his direct, rude manners, behaviour, and language. He is a billionaire who likes McDonald’s culture. The focus on the latter distracts attention from the antagonism between billionaires and workers. In reality, Trump is not workingclass but someone who appeals to the working class but is a rich billionaire whose interests are opposed to working-class interests. Trump is a figure for projection that allows collective narcissism that results in the “enlargement of the subject: by making the leader his ideal he loves himself, as it were, but gets rid of the stains of frustration and discontent which mar his picture of his own empirical self” (Adorno 1951, 140). 4.4.2 Nationalism Second, nationalism is an important feature of right-wing authoritarianism. Let us have a look at a video that Trump posted on Twitter (Figure 4.2). In the video, Trump says about the American Labor Day: The American worker built the foundation for the country we love and have today. But the American worker is getting crushed. Bad trade deals like NAFTA and TPP, such high and inexcusable taxes and fees on small businesses that employ so many good people. This Labor Day, let’s honour our American workers, then men and women who proudly keep America working. They are the absolute best anywhere in the world. There is nobody like ‘em. I’m ready to make America work again and to make America great again. That’s what we are going to do on November 8. There are four ideological features of Trump’s tweet: 1) Trump constructs the US-Americans as a mythic collective; 2) He claims that there is a unified national interest of US capital and US labour; 114 Theorists ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=129 | PRINTED_PAGE=115 3) He identifies other nations such as Mexico and China as enemies of the USA that threatens its national interest; 4) He constructs political-economic conflict as a conflict of nations and disregards actual class conflicts. In reality, US capital exploits labour both inside and outside of the USA. Trump’s nationalism distracts attention from the class antagonism. Adorno helps us to understand nationalism by arguing that demagogues make use of the logic of repressive egalitarianism as featured in nationalist ideology. “They emphasize their being different from the outsider but play down such differences within their own group and tend to level out distinctive qualities among themselves with the exception of the hierarchical one” (Adorno 1991, 146). Nationalism constructs national identity. It is inherently repressive because it defines the nation’s inner identity against outside enemies. It makes use of the friend/enemy-scheme. 4.4.3 The Friend/Enemy-Scheme Let us have a look at a tweet by Boris Johnson (Figure 4.3): This tweet implies works with a combination of the topos of numbers, the topos of weighing down, and the topos of danger (Reisigl and Wodak 2001, 77–79): it is claimed Chapter Four | Adorno and the Media in Digital Capitalism 115 Digital Authoritarianism 下一段：[继续读取](https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed.md?start=130&limit=10)